6 ms·

Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading. The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, l

by parsimo2010 5mo ago

Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading. The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live. Don't compare something optional to something mandatory. Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?). While AI water usage might still not look that bad, it would be a more honest comparison.

senko 5mo ago
> we have to eat to live You don't have to eat a burger. Skip one McDonald's trip per year and you're going to offset all your prompting water waste (see other comments in the thread).
catlikesshrimp 5mo ago
[flagged]
adammarples 5mo ago
Loads of agricultural water usage in the western states is on totally optional stuff like beef and almonds
- deejaaymac 5mo ago
  Where's the beef?!
- singpolyma3 5mo ago
  And corn for putting in gas tanks
wahnfrieden 5mo ago
Agricultural water usage distribution prioritizes luxury consumption and drought areas are subsidized
- mc32 5mo ago
  Rice is not a luxury for most people. It’s a staple. It uses ca. 40% of all irrigation water globally. Also cotton is not a luxury, though it also uses quite a bit of irrigation water.
  - traderj0e 5mo ago
    But normally they grow rice where there's abundant water. There's no shortage of water globally, it's just not always where you want it. Like they want water in the middle of the California desert to grow crops.
    - mc32 5mo ago
      Rice in Pakistan, northern India, Mali, Calif., US irrigate their rice because rainfall is insufficient. Cotton grows in semi arid regions as well.
Petersipoi 5mo ago
> have to eat to live Oh, so that's why we're growing alfalfa in the middle of deserts, flooding the fields with excess water so we can keep water rights, and then shipping the alfalfa to China. It's so we can eat!
- lxgr 5mo ago
  Yes, and now please cut the non-essential philosophical discussion, the server hosting this site doesn't run on thought experiments alone either. This comment could have been someone's hamburger!
  - trvz 5mo ago
    This site, if not overly wasteful, fits onto a single 1U server. A single car is more damaging than such a server.
    - UqWBcuFx6NV4r 5mo ago
      HN does untold societal damage.
      - rl3 5mo ago
        In other words it's not the car and its energy use, but rather its occupants. A Night at the Roxbury comes to mind. Except, way less cool.
  - sandworm101 5mo ago
    HN could run on a cellphone with a good connection. The YouTube video I am watching in another window probably burns more electrons than this entire forum.
  - cybercatgurrl 5mo ago
    and that hamburger could have fed even more in the form of plant based food! what an inefficient use of resources!
- 5mo ago
crabbone 5mo ago
Yes and no. We shouldn't compare datacenter water usage to residential water usage. We should compare it to industrial water usage, as that is what it is. The question like "how does datacenter water cooling compares to concrete factory water cooling?" makes some sense from engineering perspective, as you are comparing oranges to oranges to a degree. Residential water usage is way too different in way too many ways to be meaningfully compared to industrial usage. The scale is different, the waste water treatment is different, the infrastructure cost is different. The water quality standards are different...
matthewfcarlson 5mo ago
In the article it lists a data point that beer production in Arizona used more water than the data centers in Arizona. People may vehemently disagree, but we absolutely do not need beer. Would I trade beer for AI? That's an easy choice, AI every time. If you just keep track of the water to keep a person alive and the bare minimum water required for agriculture (which isn't particularly efficient in most cases), it would be a fraction of a fraction of what we use now. Comparing data centers to the bare minimum isn't particularly interesting, the point being made by the article is that we aren't efficient with our water usage in general, AI is a rather small source of waste in the scheme of things.
- beepbooptheory 5mo ago
  Beer has been around for like a thousand years and we haven't decided to get rid of it. We're five years into this fever dream and everyone either literally hates AI or has been driven at least a little crazy by it. It's a pretty darn easy choice for me (and most people I imagine).
  - satvikpendem 5mo ago
    Beer is a physically addictive mind altering substance, so of course we haven't decided to get rid of it (because it literally drugs you), but people go sober all the time because they know how bad it is.
    - jerlam 5mo ago
      The entire United States banned beer in the 1920s, and then un-banned it in the 30s, using a process that is unthinkable today.
  - Levitz 5mo ago
    Great news, you are free to stop using AI and to drink beer, and so are we all.
    - beepbooptheory 5mo ago
em500 5mo ago
> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking Almost half of city water usage is for residential landscape irrigation, mostly spraying lawns, which is not exactly mandatory or a basic necessity. Landscape irrigation uses about 3.5 million acre-feet / year, which is 1 to 2 order of magnitude higher than the estimated AI data center usage.
- cybercatgurrl 5mo ago
  in a desert city this is massively irresponsible but people do it anyways because they’ve forgotten they’re living in a desert
Romario77 5mo ago
one of the biggest health problems in US is obesity. 30 to 40% of the food produced in US goes to waste. Just these two facts will tell you that while, yes, we do need food to live, but on another hand we have an abundance of food and if AI data centers use 0.05% of the water used for humans. It's a strawman.
jrflo 5mo ago
A pretty easy 'optional' comparison would be golf course watering. I saw a much more detailed write up on this that I can't find now, but a quick google shows 500 billion gallons a year for US golf courses and 180 billion gallons a year for all data centers, not just AI data centers.
- js2 5mo ago
  Possibly one of these, shared to HN in the past year: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-water https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-w... https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-data-center-water https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...
- XorNot 5mo ago
  The problem with these numbers though is water isn't really lost in those processes and has another dynamic: you can't really bank it. There's tons of ecosystems where the biggest problem is we have to ensure a certain amount of water goes through them to keep them alive. And so in that context all water usage is not equal: watering a golf course where run off goes back to local estuaries is different to evaporative cooling is different to industrial or residential usage.
  - jrflo 5mo ago
    agreed, you could also argue that runoff from golf courses needs to be processed which costs energy, versus total evap cooling where the water immediately re enters the water cycle in the form of vapor. It's not an easy comparison, but it does put it in context.
- jedimastert 5mo ago
  I mean, I know a lot of people who are also against golf courses for very similar reasons
- cybercatgurrl 5mo ago
  clearly the reasonable course of action here is ban new golf courses!
lxgr 5mo ago
It seems strange to draw the line at car washes. But why stop there, and why exclude all food equally? Does somebody living a vegan lifestyle (which typically needs vastly less resources, including water, per calorie of food produced) get to wash their car in exchange for their trouble? What if I take a cold instead of a hot shower; do I then get to wash my bike every once in a while?
- kmeisthax 5mo ago
  Basically any discussion of water allocation is stupid. We already have a way to allocate water (or, really, any scarce resource) - markets. Instead of arguing over whether or not a hamburger is worth a car wash's worth of water, bill the person using the water for that amount of water. Let the water user and the price discovery mechanism fight it out. If it is not worth it to them, then they can move to somewhere where water is cheaper. We don't do this, at least not in the western half of the US. Instead, the biggest consumers of water have "water rights" - the right to use a certain amount of water every year, for free, simply for owning a particular piece of land. And these water rights were all staked out based on estimates of the Colorado River that were wildly optimistic, so there's a century-long waiting list of claims that will permanently supercede your own if you fail[0] to actually consume the water you are entitled to. This is insane, and it leads to some pretty insane incentives. Because agriculture was here first, it has the strongest claims to water, and a pretty heavy incentive to waste as much water as they are legally allowed to. A lot of the discussions surrounding water usage assume that because agriculture is necessary for human survival, that the water it uses is also necessary. It's not - and the only way to get an industrial water user to actually care about their water usage is to actually bill them for it. Once we have an actual market for water (not just water "rights"), then we can start talking about what usages are actually necessary - i.e. what uses should we explicitly subsidize through taxes rather than implicitly subsidize through a terribly designed system. [0] In the interest of fairness, I ran this comment through Google's chatbot, which would like you to know that TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, it takes ten years of intentional disuse to lose a water claim, and that there is a market for water rights. My counterargument is that most farmers do not care about how much water they can not use, and that a market for water rights is not the same as a market for water, because farmers can still decide to just use the water for free. The pricing mechanism cannot work if there are a class of protected users who do not feel backpressure from the pricing mechanism.
notJim 5mo ago
A lot of agricultural water usage (more water than AI) is for growing corn to turn into ethanol so we can add it to gasoline. It's not a small amount either, 40% of all corn in the US is used for this purpose.
- Matticus_Rex 5mo ago
  We use about two orders of magnitude more water (each!) on corn and alfalfa than on data centers as of 2023, and while we're ramping data centers up fast, it'll still be an order of magnitude at the 2030 data center estimates (which may heavily overestimate, now that there's so much opposition popping up).
km3r 5mo ago
We absolutely do not need to waste as much water as we do on agriculture. Their is more efficient watering systems, crops that do not feed humans, and inefficient crops that aren't needed. Any one of those improvements would dwarf the water usage by AI. Heck, a better solution yet would be to charge these AI/datacenter companies enough to cover the costs for watering efficiency systems to cover their usage and then some. It's a fraction of their costs, and way better than being anti-growth.
- rsoto2 5mo ago
  Yeah people aren't mad about datacenters because they are "anti growth" They don't want to see their local resources depleted and, no, this isn't some fantasyland where corporations will do anything "for the greater good" that isn't in line with their pockets.
  - km3r 5mo ago
    Don't expect them to do anything for the greater good. Regulate and require that to happen, don't ban.
skwirl 5mo ago
This is even more misleading. You have to eat to live, but absolutely not all water usage for food is mandatory. If you gave me a budget of how much water I could "use" water every year, and I was close to going over, I could easily pay for my annual AI use just by changing what I eat for lunch on a day or two. I could pay for years of AI use just by forgoing buying a new pair of jeans. The water argument has always felt so intellectually dishonest to me because it's never approached from the perspective of "hey, we're using too much water, how can we conserve it?" If we approached it from that perspective, reducing AI usage would not even crack the the top 100 list of things we would do. But that's not the goal of the water argument, because it quite obviously actually has nothing to do with water.
- TaupeRanger 5mo ago
  This is the response to have in mind when confronted with AI-water arguments. It's not about HOW the water is used, it's that, if you're truly concerned about water usage, AI is a non-factor compared to basically everything else you do on a daily basis.
pj_mukh 5mo ago
This is an extremely frustrating angle to take because what you're implying is that anytime anyone comes up with any system that takes water they should go in front of a panel of experts (seniors) who get to decide whether their water usage is for an "approvable" purpose. Now I don't like water going to Golf courses either but to me even the intermediate solution is to price water accurately. Barring that, long term we're surrounded by 70% body of water with infinite energy beaming down on us, this feels like a solvable problem without having large swaths of the country fight over scraps.
- quadrifoliate 5mo ago
  > anytime anyone comes up with any system that takes water they should go in front of a panel of experts (seniors) who get to decide whether their water usage is for an "approvable" purpose. This is absolutely how things work, the water for farming and industry is cheap by design (at least in the US) so that people will have relatively cheap food and consumer goods. Now you can absolutely try to go change that to a strictly capitalist "One gallon of water is 1 cent, whatever the usage", but you'll have a hard time finding a political group in this country that stands behind such a principal. Even the most conservative groups typically back farming subsidies.
  - pj_mukh 5mo ago
    I think that’s fine, having an extremely small group of subsidized industries because of historical reasons are fine. Going forward, I don’t expect any group of experts appointed by the government to know whether a use case is justified and being right. Chaos theory abounds and the second part of my post applies.
- rsoto2 5mo ago
  let's have the tool we created as a society called "the government" regulate it instead of waiting for "the market" to price things accurately. Because let's be real golf courses will pay higher prices and poor people will suffer the burden if we wait for your idea to magically happen
Aurornis 5mo ago
> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live. Drinking water is barely a rounding error in cities' water usage. Agricultural water usage doesn't go to the necessities to feed people. It goes to whatever is most profitable, even if that means growing water intense crops and exporting the produce overseas.
bastardoperator 5mo ago
My understanding is that data centers (at least in LA) are using mostly grey/industrial water, not water you can consume or use for agriculture. It feels like we're measuring water as one entity when not all water is equally useful to a human.
adrr 5mo ago
What about golf courses which use up 476 Billion of water every year? Way more than data centers. People complain about Nestle using water in californa for bottled water but it doesn't compare to what single golf course uses in a year.
- rsoto2 5mo ago
  yes I think these datacenters AND golf courses are a waste. crazy
throwaway_95283 5mo ago
There's not really any NEED to grow almonds. Most agriculture in California is not required to sustain life in CA. However, without AI people wouldn't have jobs that could afford CA rents, so AI is required so people can live. Lets get rid of unnecessary uses like agriculture, unless farmers can justify that the usage is actually required to sustain life. If you look at water distribution you'll find that its unevenly distributed so farmers should pay a water tax and distribute that water to the less water fortunate. CA has an extremely high water GINI with a few farmers consuming far more than their fair share.
impulser_ 5mo ago
Yeah, but data centers allow for jobs which gives people money to buy food.
yqx 5mo ago
> Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?). A very strange comparison. It seems to imply that we "need fewer humans" because of AI. It also assumes AI is primarily used to replace useful human work, something I very much doubt.
BosunoB 5mo ago
We don't need AI in the same way we don't need washing machines and dryers. Like, sure, we don't need a machine to do our laundry, just like we don't need an AI to do our skilled labor, but it sure saves us a lot of time and energy.
m463 5mo ago
> Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading Kind of reminds me of things like "low fat" labels on foods that have little fat anyway, but tons of sugar. In this case, electricity is the elephant in the room.
aoeusnth1 5mo ago
Meat is optional.
Marsymars 5mo ago
> Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. There's some irony here with my local situation (in Calgary, AB) where one of the main feeder mains is in critical disrepair - as a result there've been a couple major pipe failures, and a planned maintenance shutdown, each instance resulting in multi-week-long periods where the overall water treatment capacity of the city is greatly degraded. Throughout it all, car washes have remained fully open, and the city has been reduced to begging people to keep their showers to 3 minutes and to not flush their toilets so much. (Lest the system gets under-pressurized, resulting in boil-water advisories and insufficient water for (sub)urban fire emergencies.)
matheusmoreira 5mo ago
> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Nothing but costs! All of those people have been replaced by AI. What's the point of keeping all those economically useless people alive? This is our future if we don't achieve the fabled post-scarcity society soon.

senko 5mo ago

> we have to eat to live You don't have to eat a burger. Skip one McDonald's trip per year and you're going to offset all your prompting water waste (see other comments in the thread).

catlikesshrimp 5mo ago

[flagged]

adammarples 5mo ago

Loads of agricultural water usage in the western states is on totally optional stuff like beef and almonds

deejaaymac 5mo ago
Where's the beef?!
singpolyma3 5mo ago
And corn for putting in gas tanks

wahnfrieden 5mo ago

Agricultural water usage distribution prioritizes luxury consumption and drought areas are subsidized

mc32 5mo ago
Rice is not a luxury for most people. It’s a staple. It uses ca. 40% of all irrigation water globally. Also cotton is not a luxury, though it also uses quite a bit of irrigation water.
- traderj0e 5mo ago
  But normally they grow rice where there's abundant water. There's no shortage of water globally, it's just not always where you want it. Like they want water in the middle of the California desert to grow crops.
  - mc32 5mo ago
    Rice in Pakistan, northern India, Mali, Calif., US irrigate their rice because rainfall is insufficient. Cotton grows in semi arid regions as well.

Petersipoi 5mo ago

> have to eat to live Oh, so that's why we're growing alfalfa in the middle of deserts, flooding the fields with excess water so we can keep water rights, and then shipping the alfalfa to China. It's so we can eat!

lxgr 5mo ago
Yes, and now please cut the non-essential philosophical discussion, the server hosting this site doesn't run on thought experiments alone either. This comment could have been someone's hamburger!
- trvz 5mo ago
  This site, if not overly wasteful, fits onto a single 1U server. A single car is more damaging than such a server.
  - UqWBcuFx6NV4r 5mo ago
    HN does untold societal damage.
    - rl3 5mo ago
      In other words it's not the car and its energy use, but rather its occupants. A Night at the Roxbury comes to mind. Except, way less cool.
- sandworm101 5mo ago
  HN could run on a cellphone with a good connection. The YouTube video I am watching in another window probably burns more electrons than this entire forum.
- cybercatgurrl 5mo ago
  and that hamburger could have fed even more in the form of plant based food! what an inefficient use of resources!
5mo ago

crabbone 5mo ago

Yes and no. We shouldn't compare datacenter water usage to residential water usage. We should compare it to industrial water usage, as that is what it is. The question like "how does datacenter water cooling compares to concrete factory water cooling?" makes some sense from engineering perspective, as you are comparing oranges to oranges to a degree. Residential water usage is way too different in way too many ways to be meaningfully compared to industrial usage. The scale is different, the waste water treatment is different, the infrastructure cost is different. The water quality standards are different...

matthewfcarlson 5mo ago

In the article it lists a data point that beer production in Arizona used more water than the data centers in Arizona. People may vehemently disagree, but we absolutely do not need beer. Would I trade beer for AI? That's an easy choice, AI every time. If you just keep track of the water to keep a person alive and the bare minimum water required for agriculture (which isn't particularly efficient in most cases), it would be a fraction of a fraction of what we use now. Comparing data centers to the bare minimum isn't particularly interesting, the point being made by the article is that we aren't efficient with our water usage in general, AI is a rather small source of waste in the scheme of things.

beepbooptheory 5mo ago
Beer has been around for like a thousand years and we haven't decided to get rid of it. We're five years into this fever dream and everyone either literally hates AI or has been driven at least a little crazy by it. It's a pretty darn easy choice for me (and most people I imagine).
- satvikpendem 5mo ago
  Beer is a physically addictive mind altering substance, so of course we haven't decided to get rid of it (because it literally drugs you), but people go sober all the time because they know how bad it is.
  - jerlam 5mo ago
    The entire United States banned beer in the 1920s, and then un-banned it in the 30s, using a process that is unthinkable today.
- Levitz 5mo ago
  Great news, you are free to stop using AI and to drink beer, and so are we all.
  - beepbooptheory 5mo ago

em500 5mo ago

> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking Almost half of city water usage is for residential landscape irrigation, mostly spraying lawns, which is not exactly mandatory or a basic necessity. Landscape irrigation uses about 3.5 million acre-feet / year, which is 1 to 2 order of magnitude higher than the estimated AI data center usage.

cybercatgurrl 5mo ago
in a desert city this is massively irresponsible but people do it anyways because they’ve forgotten they’re living in a desert

Romario77 5mo ago

one of the biggest health problems in US is obesity. 30 to 40% of the food produced in US goes to waste. Just these two facts will tell you that while, yes, we do need food to live, but on another hand we have an abundance of food and if AI data centers use 0.05% of the water used for humans. It's a strawman.

jrflo 5mo ago

A pretty easy 'optional' comparison would be golf course watering. I saw a much more detailed write up on this that I can't find now, but a quick google shows 500 billion gallons a year for US golf courses and 180 billion gallons a year for all data centers, not just AI data centers.

js2 5mo ago
Possibly one of these, shared to HN in the past year: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-water https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-w... https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-data-center-water https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...
XorNot 5mo ago
The problem with these numbers though is water isn't really lost in those processes and has another dynamic: you can't really bank it. There's tons of ecosystems where the biggest problem is we have to ensure a certain amount of water goes through them to keep them alive. And so in that context all water usage is not equal: watering a golf course where run off goes back to local estuaries is different to evaporative cooling is different to industrial or residential usage.
- jrflo 5mo ago
  agreed, you could also argue that runoff from golf courses needs to be processed which costs energy, versus total evap cooling where the water immediately re enters the water cycle in the form of vapor. It's not an easy comparison, but it does put it in context.
jedimastert 5mo ago
I mean, I know a lot of people who are also against golf courses for very similar reasons
cybercatgurrl 5mo ago
clearly the reasonable course of action here is ban new golf courses!

lxgr 5mo ago

It seems strange to draw the line at car washes. But why stop there, and why exclude all food equally? Does somebody living a vegan lifestyle (which typically needs vastly less resources, including water, per calorie of food produced) get to wash their car in exchange for their trouble? What if I take a cold instead of a hot shower; do I then get to wash my bike every once in a while?

kmeisthax 5mo ago
Basically any discussion of water allocation is stupid. We already have a way to allocate water (or, really, any scarce resource) - markets. Instead of arguing over whether or not a hamburger is worth a car wash's worth of water, bill the person using the water for that amount of water. Let the water user and the price discovery mechanism fight it out. If it is not worth it to them, then they can move to somewhere where water is cheaper. We don't do this, at least not in the western half of the US. Instead, the biggest consumers of water have "water rights" - the right to use a certain amount of water every year, for free, simply for owning a particular piece of land. And these water rights were all staked out based on estimates of the Colorado River that were wildly optimistic, so there's a century-long waiting list of claims that will permanently supercede your own if you fail[0] to actually consume the water you are entitled to. This is insane, and it leads to some pretty insane incentives. Because agriculture was here first, it has the strongest claims to water, and a pretty heavy incentive to waste as much water as they are legally allowed to. A lot of the discussions surrounding water usage assume that because agriculture is necessary for human survival, that the water it uses is also necessary. It's not - and the only way to get an industrial water user to actually care about their water usage is to actually bill them for it. Once we have an actual market for water (not just water "rights"), then we can start talking about what usages are actually necessary - i.e. what uses should we explicitly subsidize through taxes rather than implicitly subsidize through a terribly designed system. [0] In the interest of fairness, I ran this comment through Google's chatbot, which would like you to know that TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, it takes ten years of intentional disuse to lose a water claim, and that there is a market for water rights. My counterargument is that most farmers do not care about how much water they can not use, and that a market for water rights is not the same as a market for water, because farmers can still decide to just use the water for free. The pricing mechanism cannot work if there are a class of protected users who do not feel backpressure from the pricing mechanism.

notJim 5mo ago

A lot of agricultural water usage (more water than AI) is for growing corn to turn into ethanol so we can add it to gasoline. It's not a small amount either, 40% of all corn in the US is used for this purpose.

Matticus_Rex 5mo ago
We use about two orders of magnitude more water (each!) on corn and alfalfa than on data centers as of 2023, and while we're ramping data centers up fast, it'll still be an order of magnitude at the 2030 data center estimates (which may heavily overestimate, now that there's so much opposition popping up).

km3r 5mo ago

We absolutely do not need to waste as much water as we do on agriculture. Their is more efficient watering systems, crops that do not feed humans, and inefficient crops that aren't needed. Any one of those improvements would dwarf the water usage by AI. Heck, a better solution yet would be to charge these AI/datacenter companies enough to cover the costs for watering efficiency systems to cover their usage and then some. It's a fraction of their costs, and way better than being anti-growth.

rsoto2 5mo ago
Yeah people aren't mad about datacenters because they are "anti growth" They don't want to see their local resources depleted and, no, this isn't some fantasyland where corporations will do anything "for the greater good" that isn't in line with their pockets.
- km3r 5mo ago
  Don't expect them to do anything for the greater good. Regulate and require that to happen, don't ban.

skwirl 5mo ago

This is even more misleading. You have to eat to live, but absolutely not all water usage for food is mandatory. If you gave me a budget of how much water I could "use" water every year, and I was close to going over, I could easily pay for my annual AI use just by changing what I eat for lunch on a day or two. I could pay for years of AI use just by forgoing buying a new pair of jeans. The water argument has always felt so intellectually dishonest to me because it's never approached from the perspective of "hey, we're using too much water, how can we conserve it?" If we approached it from that perspective, reducing AI usage would not even crack the the top 100 list of things we would do. But that's not the goal of the water argument, because it quite obviously actually has nothing to do with water.

TaupeRanger 5mo ago
This is the response to have in mind when confronted with AI-water arguments. It's not about HOW the water is used, it's that, if you're truly concerned about water usage, AI is a non-factor compared to basically everything else you do on a daily basis.

pj_mukh 5mo ago

This is an extremely frustrating angle to take because what you're implying is that anytime anyone comes up with any system that takes water they should go in front of a panel of experts (seniors) who get to decide whether their water usage is for an "approvable" purpose. Now I don't like water going to Golf courses either but to me even the intermediate solution is to price water accurately. Barring that, long term we're surrounded by 70% body of water with infinite energy beaming down on us, this feels like a solvable problem without having large swaths of the country fight over scraps.

quadrifoliate 5mo ago
> anytime anyone comes up with any system that takes water they should go in front of a panel of experts (seniors) who get to decide whether their water usage is for an "approvable" purpose. This is absolutely how things work, the water for farming and industry is cheap by design (at least in the US) so that people will have relatively cheap food and consumer goods. Now you can absolutely try to go change that to a strictly capitalist "One gallon of water is 1 cent, whatever the usage", but you'll have a hard time finding a political group in this country that stands behind such a principal. Even the most conservative groups typically back farming subsidies.
- pj_mukh 5mo ago
  I think that’s fine, having an extremely small group of subsidized industries because of historical reasons are fine. Going forward, I don’t expect any group of experts appointed by the government to know whether a use case is justified and being right. Chaos theory abounds and the second part of my post applies.
rsoto2 5mo ago
let's have the tool we created as a society called "the government" regulate it instead of waiting for "the market" to price things accurately. Because let's be real golf courses will pay higher prices and poor people will suffer the burden if we wait for your idea to magically happen

Aurornis 5mo ago

> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live. Drinking water is barely a rounding error in cities' water usage. Agricultural water usage doesn't go to the necessities to feed people. It goes to whatever is most profitable, even if that means growing water intense crops and exporting the produce overseas.

bastardoperator 5mo ago

My understanding is that data centers (at least in LA) are using mostly grey/industrial water, not water you can consume or use for agriculture. It feels like we're measuring water as one entity when not all water is equally useful to a human.

adrr 5mo ago

What about golf courses which use up 476 Billion of water every year? Way more than data centers. People complain about Nestle using water in californa for bottled water but it doesn't compare to what single golf course uses in a year.

rsoto2 5mo ago
yes I think these datacenters AND golf courses are a waste. crazy

throwaway_95283 5mo ago

There's not really any NEED to grow almonds. Most agriculture in California is not required to sustain life in CA. However, without AI people wouldn't have jobs that could afford CA rents, so AI is required so people can live. Lets get rid of unnecessary uses like agriculture, unless farmers can justify that the usage is actually required to sustain life. If you look at water distribution you'll find that its unevenly distributed so farmers should pay a water tax and distribute that water to the less water fortunate. CA has an extremely high water GINI with a few farmers consuming far more than their fair share.

impulser_ 5mo ago

Yeah, but data centers allow for jobs which gives people money to buy food.

yqx 5mo ago

> Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?). A very strange comparison. It seems to imply that we "need fewer humans" because of AI. It also assumes AI is primarily used to replace useful human work, something I very much doubt.

BosunoB 5mo ago

We don't need AI in the same way we don't need washing machines and dryers. Like, sure, we don't need a machine to do our laundry, just like we don't need an AI to do our skilled labor, but it sure saves us a lot of time and energy.

m463 5mo ago

> Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading Kind of reminds me of things like "low fat" labels on foods that have little fat anyway, but tons of sugar. In this case, electricity is the elephant in the room.

aoeusnth1 5mo ago

Meat is optional.

Marsymars 5mo ago

> Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. There's some irony here with my local situation (in Calgary, AB) where one of the main feeder mains is in critical disrepair - as a result there've been a couple major pipe failures, and a planned maintenance shutdown, each instance resulting in multi-week-long periods where the overall water treatment capacity of the city is greatly degraded. Throughout it all, car washes have remained fully open, and the city has been reduced to begging people to keep their showers to 3 minutes and to not flush their toilets so much. (Lest the system gets under-pressurized, resulting in boil-water advisories and insufficient water for (sub)urban fire emergencies.)

matheusmoreira 5mo ago

> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Nothing but costs! All of those people have been replaced by AI. What's the point of keeping all those economically useless people alive? This is our future if we don't achieve the fabled post-scarcity society soon.